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Postings from January 2023
I have a longterm thought that one day it'd be nice if we could have more, and more descriptive, string quoting and regexp flags - especially on substitutions. For example, I'd love to be able to replace only the third "foo" with "bar" by doing something, maybe using syntax like this: $str =~ s:nth(2)/foo/bar/; I haven't thought it through any further than "I would like the colon". That's a problem because currently colon just behaves like any other delimiting character. $str =~ s:nth:replacement:; Oops. I would therefore like to ask how people would feel about perl printing a reserved-style warning whenever a quoted string or regexp uses a colon for its delimiter. That is to say, any of the following forms q:string: qq:interpolated string: qw:quoted word list: qx:executed string: qr:regexp literal: m:regexp match: s:pattern:replacement: tr:trans:literation: or y:trans:literation: would all print a warning something to the effect of Use of ':' as a quotelike delimiter is reserved for possible future use at FILE line LINE. For now I'm not suggesting doing anything to change the actual behaviour. Programs would run as they do now aside from that (compiletime) warning. Additionally I don't have any specific concrete suggestion for a plan of exactly what syntax these would use. I just feel that the earlier we get that reservation in, the sooner in the future we can start to think about actually using it. Thoughts? -- Paul "LeoNerd" Evans leonerd@leonerd.org.uk | https://metacpan.org/author/PEVANS http://www.leonerd.org.uk/ | https://www.tindie.com/stores/leonerd/Thread Next